live the questions

There are a lot of questions, very serious and important questions about sovereignty, agency, supremacy, and oppression that are seemingly becoming more and more important to answer in order to fight the unyielding death drive of our nation. There are a lot of questions people are afraid (or refuse) to ask because there may be no available answer. Or the answer is something that will require such a radical and arduous shift they fear they won’t survive it. OR there are so many damn answers and a single one can not answer to them all. I can’t even answer the question of how why there is no answer.

Some think of justice as a place of arrival. “A seat at the table”. But there have been people like us at the table for a long time and are still waiting to eat. What of the people who cooked for the people at the table, who washed their dishes, and take care of their children? There is no time, or energy, or desire to stand in line to sit and starve to death.

Some might say it’s only realistic. You’ve got to make a living. And make a living we should, but reality it sure aint. The idea of this table, this room, is a scene to make reality bearable. What reality is for most is exploitation at it’s core.

This is the indelible importance of art and artists. Artists are beholden to one rule, to tell the truth. Some might say people make art because they can’t deal with reality. And why should we? Why should we answer to questions or demands that are not relevant to what we truly believe in? Why enter a conversation that doesn’t talk on the level of a lived experience? Why should we have to disassociate from our lives? Art takes these questions and provokes another. It responds to a ‘reality’ by expressing a truth in a way, if done well, can only promise more truths. It can reframe our reality in ways that Fact cannot. And yeah, Fact is fundamental but truth is separate from Fact because fact can exist without humanity and truth cannot. That is important. We need humanity. We need to see it to believe it. We respond to art because art is someone’s truth. We have a response, and though it isn’t an answer, is an honest reply. It is a truthful dialectic. And that is the start of something real.

When the conversation is framed in a way that only leaves room for people “at the table”, fuck the table. Fuck the thin veil of sophistication that covers completely irrational and straight up fabricated ideas of “reality”. We live in political realities. Multitudes of them.

So I guess I just want to offer one thing. When you cannot answer “What can I do?” or “Where will I go?”, when you are speechless in horror or suffocation, the chaos of life is an incredible transformative energy. Let it ransom our memory of peace or equality where there was none. Let it disturb our aesthetics. Let it make us all criminals under unjust law. Let it rob us of answers. Let it reveal our truth. Let it make us artists.